Escondido's Allie Trimm, a junior in high school and already a Broadway veteran at age 15, plays Hannah in "Allegiance."

Stage musicals have taken on their share of formidable topics in recent years, from mental illness (“Next to Normal”) to political violence (“Assassins”) to the sexual struggles of adolescents (“Spring Awakening”) and (less solemnly) puppets (“Avenue Q”).

So, if the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II doesn’t immediately come across as a natural subject for song and dance, there’s at least some precedent for the boundary-testing nature of the idea.

“Allegiance,” a musical drama based on that historical trauma, also has some name talent in its corner — along with several San Diego connections. Although the work is still in development, its producers and creative team hope to land it on Broadway in 2012. To that end, they’re in talks for an initial production at a regional theater — preferably in California, possibly in San Diego.

The current version of the show, about a family of Japanese heritage forced from their California home in 1942, features Allie Trimm, a 15-year-old performer from Escondido who has already done two Broadway musicals (“Bye Bye Birdie” and “13”). One of its investor-producers is Wendy Gillespie, a San Diegan and relative newcomer to theater who has helped organize a private showcase for “Allegiance” here this week.

The biggest names in its present cast are Lea Salonga, who won a 1991 Tony Award as the original Kim in “Miss Saigon,” and George Takei, the “Star Trek” icon (Mr. Sulu) who is also helping produce the new show. Takei has a particularly deep connection to “Allegiance”; as a young boy, the Los Angeles-born actor endured internment in two camps with his family.

Lorenzo Thione, the producer and co-writer who is teaming with composer Jay Kuo on “Allegiance,” says opening the show on Broadway in 2012 would have special significance. That year marks the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the measure signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that authorized sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps.

More than 100,000 people of Japanese descent — most of them, like Takei, U.S. citizens living on the West Coast — were uprooted from their homes and sent to camps around the nation. The action sprang from fear of spying or sabotage on behalf of the Japanese war effort after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, although many of those interned had never set foot in Japan. (A law signed by President Reagan in 1988 apologized for those events and granted reparations to surviving internees.)

Kuo and Thione were inspired to write “Allegiance” after an unlikely pair of chance meetings with Takei in New York two years ago — first at a performance of the musical “[title of show]” and then, the very next night, at “In the Heights.”

After that show, Takei told the pair how moved he had been by “Inutil,” a song about helplessness sung by the father figure in “Heights”; he then described his own father’s struggles during (and after) internment, as the family was forced to live temporarily in horse stables at the Santa Anita racetrack before being sent to camps in Arkansas and Northern California.